A Neverending Affair (19 page)

Ronia sealed the envelope. All the time since they met in Rome the month before, she had been thinking about Olaf, how much she missed him, how much she regretted the break
up. But she also realized that he was married—again—and this time had a daughter he adored. Still, she just could not refrain from writing him a short letter.

It is so hard to be without you

It was so hard to meet you

It is so hard to be alone

It was so hard to be with you

I have learned a lesson or two

I wonder if you have done s
o too

Olaf, I will always love you.

Again,

yours,

f
orever,

Ronia

“There is no one that can take your place or match the beauty of your face
.” (Cher)

After Chindrieux, they were in close email communi
cation, but it was a sour communication. Olaf called a few times, trying to get back the old feelings, but mostly it failed. In mid-April he called.

“Hi
, Ronia, how’s life?”

“Oh, fine
, thank you. Spring is here in full swing. It’s really pretty outside. The bulbs are flowering, whatever they’re called in English, those yellow ones.”

“Hm, here we still have a week or two to go before t
he daffodils flowers. They are just emerging,” he inhaled deeply. “I wonder how we can make things good between us again. I don’t even know what the problem is.”

“You don’t?

“No, I don’t. If you do, please explain it to me.”

“The problem is tha
t you try to push me into accepting things I don’t want, or am not ready to accept, that there is a God; that we should have children; that we should live together.”

Olaf felt how hurt he was, especially from
her last statement. Of course, they should want to live together when they loved one another so much! Because he was most hurt by that and it caused the most personal pain, he avoided speaking about it and instead raised religion.

“That I want you to believe in God is not stranger than that both of us want to
support the oppressed in the world, that both of us realize how women are still oppressed in most parts of the world, that we value human cultures, etc. You have made me appreciate art in a way I never did before. I made myself open and ready for that; I listened to you; I tried to understand what you wanted to say with no biases against it. You also made me understand the logic of an oppressed people, the Armenians. In short, I have made myself open to you, but you refuse to open your heart for things that are important to me.”

“You see, now we are there again
,” Ronia said. “Just drop it. Why can’t we just enjoy each other?” She said it as an accusation to Olaf, even if she deep inside knew they were both to blame.

“I know I come across as the int
olerant person here,” she added. “That I am the one who arrogantly thinks I know the truth. But I think that is an illusion. I think that you pity me for my lack of faith. I know that you want me to believe, and I know that you are as intolerant as I am in that sense. The tolerance with nonbelievers is just ‘tolerance’ in the same sense that you tolerate bad behavior from a child because it doesn’t understand better. I don’t want that kind of tolerance. I am no child, and I am certainly not your child. I believe there is more tolerance embedded in trying to understand and discuss each other’s perspective than to avoid it with reference to belief. That is just erecting a wall between us.”

“You always
turn the blame on me, Ronia. I don’t think that’s fair.”

“
Olaf, let’s talk some other time. This leads nowhere,” Ronia said and slowly hung up. 

By the end of May, they both longed for each other and put their differences aside, plotting what to do in Italy, how to do it, instead.

They had agreed to meet in Rome. Olaf
had a shorter meeting for the European Association of Fair Trade Enterprises, where he was a member, on the route to the Board if things continued like they were. Ronia came down the second of June, and they planned to do a bit of tourism together.

It wa
s steaming hot when Ronia boarded the train from the airport, and then in the metro leading to Palatino. In the end, she got lost, and soaked with sweat, hailed a taxi. The taxi found Villa di Antonio and let her off for a fat fee. She was early. Olaf was still in a meeting. She got the key from reception. Now they had a double room and not two rooms as they had mostly had before. The room was smallish for two people. It faced a wall in the atrium and the view down was on a plastic roof. Ronia was too hot to care so much about that. She stripped rapidly and jumped into the shower, under which she stood for quite a while. She felt a lot better. Inside the room, the heat was not so pressing. There was air conditioning, but she let herself air dry and felt no need to switch it on. She stretched out on the bed naked.

Olaf smiled when she saw her stretched out asleep, in her birthday suit, on the bed. He silently put down his stuff and undressed
. He pondered over whether he should take a shower, but ruled against it, not wanting to risk it that she would wake up from the noise. He lay down next to her, whispering in her ear.

“My Ronia, I missed you so much
. I long for you all the time. You are the dream of my life. I never want to leave you again. Let us live together forever. Let us make love every day for the rest of our lives.” His hand caressed her shoulder, his tongue licking her ear, his lips following her neckline down to the collar bone.

Ron
ia moaned and pulled him over her, spreading her legs.

“Come to me
,” she whispered, without opening her eyes. “Come to me, Viking, ravage me; take me hard; come deep inside me.”

“You
don’t have to ask twice,” Olaf said.

When
Olaf woke up, it was already dusk. They were still entangled, in a way he normally wouldn’t be able to sleep. They were both sweating. He bit Ronia playfully in the earlobe and said it was time to get up, time to eat; that he was hungry as a wolf.

Ronia looked at him
, “I dreamed we made love. It was so wonderful.”

“Silly girl,
we did make love.”

“No
, it was a dream!” she protested.

“Just feel with your hand and you will find physical evidence for us making love.
”

“So you mean we can still love like this? We haven’t ruined it forever?
”

“
Silly sweetie, get up, take a shower, and then we are off to eat. I’m starving.”

They found a cool restaurant with interesting food, not the typical Italian style restaurant, but supposedly as it was in the time of the Romans. It was pricey. They were supposed to lie down on divans. It was a bit “touristy,” but still very nice.

“This was a wonderful start of our three days in Rome
,” Ronia said.

“Let’s go through the master plan
,” Olaf suggested. “Tomorrow is allocated to getting an overview of the city. We take a morning bus tour, at nine departing from Colloseo, about half an hour’s walk from the hotel. The tour ends at one, which is time for lunch. We can jump off the bus before coming back to Colloseo in the area of Piazza Navona, where there are plenty of nice restaurants. After lunch, we can wander around, perhaps visiting the Pantheon. For the evening, I have booked a table at one of the boats in the Tiber. At seven.

“The following morning, I would suggest we go to the Campo dei Fiori market, but that has to be early, other
wise the things are gone. Is that fine with you? In the Campo dei Fiori, they sell all kinds of food. It has a great atmosphere and you should bring your camera.”

“Early means what?”

“In order to be there before eight, we need to leave the hotel at seven, walk to the metro, take the metro and then walk a bit again. I suggest we don’t eat breakfast. Italian breakfast sucks anyway. We can grab a coffee at the market.”

So they continue
d the planning in a good mood. The third day they would devote to art until they both flew out around five in the afternoon. Ronia wanted to visit the Galleria Lazzari.

They walked back to the hotel holding hands. They had drunk a bit too much
, and when they came back to the hotel, they made love again. The following morning, they were both tired, but managed to get onto the tour bus. They saw all the sites and jumped off in via del Cappelari to find a place to eat.

“Olaf, you have organized this well,” Ronia said
, taking his hand after finishing the meal. “Is this how it will be?”

“How what will be
?”

“Us living together
.”

“What do you mean? That I organize
everything? Or that we travel to new places all the time? Or that we eat food in Italian restaurants? Or that we make love every night?”

“Olaf, I love when you are silly
. It normally cheers me up. But I’m troubled by our failure to communicate in Chindrieux and since Chindrieux. I don’t even know if it is the communication itself that is the problem or if the problem is that we differ on all these issues.”

“Ronia, I really don’t kno
w if we should discuss this anymore. Why can’t we just be happy, love each other and enjoy our great love?”

“It doesn’t work like that, you know it also. Even if I am the one that raises the problems
this time, you do the same other times.”

“But I don’t know what there is that is wrong. I love you
. I love you from the bottom of my heart, but then, now and then, things stall. The love gets side-tracked and there is just anger and frustration.”

“So what are the problems then? Should we list them? Make them visible so that we
can rationally sort them out?” she said.

“OK, Ronia,
if we really have to go there. I think that in itself is the major problem—perhaps the first problem in the list, in my list at least—your overanalyzing things. You want to turn every stone. You want to understand everything. You want to be so rational. It always surprised me how someone can be so rational, or want to be so rational, and still be a painter and paint things like you do.”

“What do you mean
by that? What is the problem with being rational and painting?”

“No problem, but paintings speak to
our emotions mainly and not to our rational mind, so a good painting is not based on rationality but on emotions, or in your case perhaps crude instinct—in any case not on rationality. “

“So now you made our probl
em into my problem,” Ronia said.

“That wa
s not my intention; it was just something of a start. My point was that the issues where we differ, where we have problems, are difficult enough as they are, but then you make it worse by overanalyzing them.”

“In my view, you are the one
who turns those issues into conflict, by refusing to discuss them in a rational way. Your belief in God is the most obvious example. You simply refuse to let that belief be challenged or discussed. It is a ‘feeling,’ a ‘belief,’ a ‘faith,’ an ‘insight,’ that can’t be rationally discussed. And through that you exclude me. And you apply the same kind of reasoning for other issues as well, such as the issue of children. “

“But Ronia, it is impossible to discuss those things with you in a rational way. Your mind is like a knife
. You cut all my arguments into small pieces. You make me feel silly and primitive. You don’t try to understand my point of view. You just grind my view into dust.”

“You
’ve said things like that before, Olaf, and I find it cruel. How can I refrain from using logic? It doesn’t mean I don’t respect you. On the contrary, it is because I respect you that I try to understand your view. If I didn’t respect you, I wouldn’t care less. Can’t you see that? Science is built upon falsifying theories. You can never prove what is right. You can make propositions and theories about what is right and then you gain knowledge by falsifying those theories. Some theories stand well against falsification, say like Darwin’s theory about natural selection. It is not beautiful or nice to have a critical mindset, but it is actually what moves humanity ahead.”

“I have heard you saying that before, but you should also see that by doing so you are rejecting my emotions
. You are rejecting
me
. I am my feelings and my emotions much more than the rational thought, and if you can’t appreciate that, I don’t think you can appreciate me at all. The distinction between the person and the issue is an artificial one when it comes to fundamental beliefs. What does it really mean?” Olaf continued and now he was losing his calm. “And to apply the scientific critical approach to personal relationship issues is simply not right. Love doesn’t grow in an atmosphere of criticism. I wonder if you are able to really love anybody with that attitude? You are cold. You treat me—and our love—as a rational object, not as something of flesh and blood.”

“Olaf, you are
being unfair now. Stop it, please stop it,” she cried out.

“You see, first you hurt me
. You kick me in the groin, you punch me in the stomach, and when I finally try to give back just a little of your own treatment, you become sad and hurt, and I am swiftly the bad one, even if you started the whole thing.”

Silence
. She wanted to say something, but she thought whatever she said would be wrong.

“
Here is my share of the meal. I will look for another place to sleep. I can’t go on like this,” he said throwing a wad of liras on the table and walking out.